Fortune, or rather the Father of Waters, had favoured Parson Elijah Rasba in the accomplishment of his errand. It might not have happened in a decade that he locate a fugitive within a hundred miles of Cairo, where the Forks of the Ohio is the jumping-off place of the stream of people from a million square miles.

Rasba knew it. The fervour of the prophets was in his heart, and the light of understanding was brightening in his mind. Something seemed to have caught the doors of his intelligence and thrown them wide open.

In the pent-up valleys of the mountains, with their little streams, their little trails, their dull and hopeless inhabitants, their wars begun in disputes over pigs and abandoned peach orchards, their moonshine and hate of government revenues, there had been no chance for Parson Rasba to get things together in his mind.

The days and nights on the rivers had opened his eyes. When he asked himself: “If this is the Mississippi, what must the Jordan be?” he found a perspective.

Sitting there beside the wounded Jest Prebol, by the light of a big table lamp, he “wrestled” with his Bible the obscurities of which had long tormented his ignorance and baffled his mental bondage.

The noises of the witches’ hours were in the air. Wavelets splashed along the side and under the bow of the Prebol shanty-boat. The mooring ropes stretched audibly, and the timber heads to which they were fastened squeaked and strained; the wind slapped and hissed and whined on all sides, crackling through the 145 heavy timber up the bank. The great river pouring by seemed to have a low, deep growl while the wind in the skies rumbled among the clouds.

No wonder Rasba could understand! He could imagine anything if he did not hold fast to that great Book which rested on his knees, but holding fast to it, the whisperings and chucklings and hissings which filled the river wilderness, and the deep tone of the flood, the hollow roar of the passing storm, were but signs of the necessity of faith in the presence of the mysteries.

So Rasba wrestled; so he grappled with the things he must know, in the light of the things he did know. And a kind of understanding which was also peace comforted him. He closed the Book at last, and let his mind drift whither it would.

Panoramas of the river, like pictures, unfolded before his eyes; he remembered flashes taken of men, women, and children; he dwelt for a time on the ruin of the church up there in the valley, standing vainly against a mountain slide; his face warmed, his eyes moistened. His mind seized eagerly upon a vision of the memory, the pretty woman, whose pistol had shot down the deluded and now stricken wretch there in the cabin.

The anomaly of the fact that he was caring for her victim was not lost on his shrewd understanding. He was gathering up and helping patch the wreckage she was making. It was a curious conceit, and Elijah Rasba, while he smiled at the humour of it, was at the same time conscious of its sad truth.

Her presence on the river meant no good for any one; Prebol was but one of her victims; perhaps he was the least unfortunate of them all! Others might perish through her, while it was not too much to hope that Prebol, through his sufferings, might be willing to profit by their lesson. Rasba was glad that he had not overtaken 146 her that night of inexplicable pursuit. Her brightness, her prettiness, her appeal had been irresistible to him, and he could but acknowledge, while he trembled at the fact, that for the time he had been possessed by her enchantment.

Thus he meditated and puzzled about the things which, in his words, had come to pass. Before he knew it, daylight had arrived, and Jock Drones came over to greet him with “Good mo’nin’, Parson!” Prebol was sleeping and there was colour in his cheeks, enough to make them look more natural. When Doctor Grell arrived, just as the three sat down to breakfast, he cheered them with the information that Prebol was coming through though the shadow had rested close to him.

None of them admitted, even to himself, the strain the wounded man had been and was on their nerves. Under his seeming indifference Buck was near the breaking point; Jock, victim of a thousand worries, was bent under his burdens. Grell, having fought the all-night fight for a human life, was still weak with weariness from the effort. Rasba, a newcomer, brought welcome reserves of endurance, assistance, and confidence.

“Yo’ men shore have done yo’ duty by a man in need,” he told them, and none of them could understand why that truthful statement should make them feel so very comfortable.

They left the sick man to go on board the gaming boat, and they sat on the stern deck, where they looked across the river and the levee to the roofs of Caruthersville. If they looked at the horizon, their attention was attracted and their gaze held by the swirling of the river current. Their eyes could not be drawn away from that tremendous motion, the rush of 147 a thousand acres of surface; the senses were appalled by the magnitude of its suggestion.

“Going to play to-night?” Grell asked, uneasily.

“No,” Buck replied, instantly.

“So!” the doctor exclaimed.

“Slip’s going up on the steamboat.”

“For good?”

“So’m I!” Buck continued, breathlessly; “I’m quitting the riveh, too! I’ve been down here a good many years. I’ve been thinking. I’m going back. I’m going up the bank again.”

“What’ll you do with the boat?” Grell continued.

“Slip and I’ve been talking it all over. We’re through with it. We guessed the Prophet, here, could use it. We’re going to give it to him.”

“Going to give hit to me!” Rasba started up and stared at the man.

“Yes, Parson; that poplar boat of yours isn’t what you need down here.” Buck smiled. “This big pine boat’s better; you could preach in this boat.”

Tears started in Rasba’s eyes and dripped through his dark whiskers. Buck and Jock had acted with the impulsiveness of gambling men. Something in the fact that Rasba had come down those strange miles had touched them, had given Drones courage to go back and face the music, and to Buck the desire to return into his old life.

“We’re going up on the Kate to-morrow morning,” Buck explained. “Slip’d better show you how to run the gasolene boat if you don’t know how, Parson!”

Dazed by the access of fortune, Rasba spent the mid-afternoon learning to run the 28-foot gasolene launch which was used to tow the big houseboat which would make such a wonderful floating church. It was a big boat only a little more than two years old. Buck had 148 made it himself, on the Upper Mississippi, for a gambling boat. The frame was light, and the cabin was built with double boards, with building paper between, to keep out the cold wintry winds.

“Gentlemen,” Rasba choked, looking at the two donors of the gift, “I’m going to be the best kind of a man I know how––”

“It’s your job to be a parson,” Buck laughed. “If it wasn’t for men like us, that need reforming, you’d be up against it for something to look out for. You aren’t much used to the river, and I’ll suggest that when you drop down you land in eddies sheltered from the west and south winds. They sure do tear things up sometimes. I’ve had the roof tore off a boat I was in, and I saw sixty-three boats sunk at Cairo’s Kentucky shanty-boat town one morning after a big wind.”

“I’ll keep a-lookin’,” Rasba assured him, “but I’ve kind-a lost the which-way down heah. One day I had the sun ahead, behind, and both sides––”

“There’s maps in that pile of stuff in the corner,” Buck said, going to the duffle. “You’re on Sheet 4 now. Here’s Caruthersville.”

“Yas, suh. Those red lines?”

“The new survey. You see, that sandbar up in Little Prairie Bend has cut loose from Island No. 15, and moved down three miles, and we’re at the foot of this bar, here. That’s moved down, too, and that big bar down there was made between the surveys. You see, they had to move the levee back, and Caruthersville moved over the new levee––”

“Sho!” Rasba gasped. “What ails this old riveh?”

“She jes’ wriggles, same’s water into a muddy road downhill,” Kippy laughed. “Up there in Little Prairie Bend hit’s caved right through the old levee, and they had to loop around. Now they’ve reveted it.” 149

“Reveted?”

“They’ve woven a willow mattress and weighted it down with broken rock from up the river—more than a mile of it, now, and they’ll have to put down another mile before they can head the river off there.”

“Put a carpet down. How wide?”

“Four hundred feet probably––”

“An’ a mile long!” Rasba whispered, awed. “Every thing’s big on the riveh!”

“Yes, sir—that’s it—big!” Buck laughed.

Thus the four gossiped, and when Doctor Grell had taken his departure the three talked together about the river and its wonders. At intervals they went over to look after Prebol whose chief requirement was quiet, meat broths, and his medicines.

As night drew down Drones turned to Buck:

“It’s goin’ to be hard leaving the riveh! I neveh will forget, Buck. If I’m sent to jail for all my life, I’ll have something to remember. If they hang me, I shore will come back to walk with those that walk in the middle of the river.”

“What’s that?” Rasba turned and demanded.

“Riveh folks believe that thousands of people who died down thisaway, sunk in snagged steamers, caught in burned-up boats, blown to kingdom come in boiler explosions, those that have been murdered, and who died along the banks, keep a-goin’ up and down.”

“Sho!” Rasba exclaimed. “Yo’ b’lieve that?”

“A man believes a heap more after he’s tripped the riveh once or twice, than he ever believed in all his borned days, eh, Buck?”

“It’s so!” Buck cried out. “Last night I was thinking that I’d wasted my life down here; years and years I’ve been a shanty-boater, drifter, fisherman, trapper, market hunter, and late years, I’ve gambled. I’ve 150 been getting in bad, worse all the while. The Prophet here, coming along, seemed to wake me up—the man I used to be—I mean. It wasn’t so much what you said, Parson, but your being here. Then I’ve been thinking all over again. I’ve an idea, boys, that when I go back up to-morrow I won’t be so sorry for what I’ve been, as glad that I didn’t grow worse than I did. It won’t be easy, boys—going back. I’m taking the old river with me, though. I’ve framed its bends and islands, its chutes and reaches, like pictures in my mind. Old Parson here, too, coming in on us the way he did, saying that this was hell, but he’d come here to live in it. That’s what waked me up, Parson! I could see how you felt. You’d never seen such a place before, but you said in your heart and your eyes showed it, Parson, that you would leave God’s country to help us poor devils. It’s just a point of view, though. I’m going right up to my particular hell, and I’ll look back here to this thousand miles of river as heaven. Yes, sir! But my job is up there—in that hell!”

So they talked, and always their thoughts were on the river channel, and their minds groping into the future.

When the Kate whistled way down at Bell’s Landing, Rasba took the two across to Caruthersville and bade them good-bye at the landing.

The Kate pulled out and Parson Rasba crossed to the three houseboats, two of them his own. He went in to see Prebol, who was lonesome and wanted to talk a little.

“What you going to do, Parson?” Prebol asked.

“I’d kind-a like to get to see shanty-boaters, and talk to them,” the man answered. “I wonder couldn’t yo’ sort of he’p me; tell me where I mout begin and where it’d he’p the most, an’ hurt people’s feelin’s the least? 151 I’d jes’ kind-a like to be useful. Course, I got to get you cured up an’ took cyar of first.”

“I cayn’t say much about being pious on Old Mississip’,” Prebol grinned, “but theh’s two ways of findin’ trouble. One’s to set still long enough, and then, again, you can go lookin’ fo’ hit. Course, yo’ know me! I’ve hunted trouble pretty fresh, an’ I’ve found hit, an’ I’ve lived onto hit. I cayn’t he’p much about doin’ good, an’ missionaryin’, an’ River Prophetin’.”

When Prebol’s voice showed the strain of talking Rasba bade him rest. Then he went over to the big boat, a gift that would have sold for $1,000. He looked at the crap table, the little poker tables with the brass-slot kitties; he stared at the cabinet of cards and dice.

“All mine!” he said.

He walked out on the deck where he could commune with the river, using his eyes, his ears, and the feeling that the warm afternoon gave him. The sun shone upon him, and made a narrow pathway across the rushing torrent. The sky was blue and cloudless. Of the cold, the wind, the sea of liquid mud, not one trace remained.

He looked down and up the river, and his eyes caught a flicker which became a flutter, like the agitation of a duck preening its feathers on a smooth surface.

He watched it for a long time. He did not know what it was. As a river man, his curiosity was excited, but there was something more than mere curiosity; the river instinct that the inexplicable and unknown should be watched and inquired into moved him almost unconsciously to watch that distant agitation which became a dot afloat in a mirage of light. A little later a sudden flash along the river surface disclosed that the thing was a shanty-boat turning in the coiling currents at the bend. 152

The sun drew nearer the tree tops. The little cabin-boat was seeking a place to land or anchor for the night. If it was an old river man, the boat would drop into some little eddy at Caruthersville or down below; but a stranger on the river would likely shoot across into the gamblers’ eddy tempted, perhaps, by the three boats already there.

The boat drew swiftly near, and as it ran down, the navigator rowed to make the shanty-boat eddy. Parson Rasba discovered that it was a woman at the sweeps, and a few strokes later he knew that it was a slim, young woman. When she coasted down outside the eddy, to swing in at the foot, and arrived opposite him, he recognized her.

“God he’p me!” he choked, “hit’s Missy Nelia. Hit’s Missy Nelia! An’ she’s a runned away married woman—an’ theh’s the man she shot!”

“Hello-o, Parson!” she hailed him, “did you see a skiff with a reporter man drop by?”

“No, missy!” he shook his head, his heart giving a painful thump

“I’m a-landing in, Parson!” she cried. “I want to talk with you!”

With that she leaned forward, drove the sweeps deep, and her boat started in like a skiff. It seemed to Parson Rasba that he had never seen a more beautiful picture in all his days.